Find a winning formula and repeat it is the mantra of many successful businesses, but giving the audience more of what they want can be a trap for any artist. So this year Daniel Kitson, whose storytelling shows have been some of the most covetable festival tickets in recent years, and whose National theatre run of It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later sold out quicker than you can say the title of this latest show, is trying to do things differently. He is weary of his own monologues about "sad old men and lonely young women" and "the fucking dignity of unwitnessed lives". In fact, he thinks his previous work may be way overrated, so he's written a play.

It's a fantastic play with a cast of six, sets with a real wow factor, complex lighting and even real rain. Only there is a bit of problem. He didn't finish writing it until 1 August, so there hasn't been time to get the show up and running. Kitson is just going to have to sit at a table and read the whole thing himself. Which he does – stage directions, typos and all.

In other hands this might be rather dull, but Kitson is incapable of boring anyone. His brain and tongue work fast: too fast, sometimes, for us to keep up with this multilayered story. It's about a writer who is writing a play about writers who are writing another play which features the storytelling Maximilian Cathcart, a man who lives his life by always letting go of the past and moving on. The whole thing is a theatrical hall of mirrors.

It's astonishingly virtuoso, and its interest is less in the narrative itself than in watching an artist think out loud about what they have done in the past and what they might do in the future. It is possible to view the entire thing as Kitson rashly lighting a match under his previous output and watching it burn. However hard he tries to send himself up, it is inevitably self-aggrandising; there is also something a little odd about blaming your fans for taking you and your work to their hearts. Yet even when this show is like a snake intent on swallowing its own tail, it still fizzes with ideas, explodes with verbal dexterity, and invites the audience to bring their imaginations to the table. Before we know it, we've been "Kitsonned".